June 18, 2010

British Columbia's fish farms threatened with protests

Last month, 1,000 British Columbians showed up on Government Street in Victoria for a protest against salmon farms, holding signs that say, "Ban fish farms."

The people called them dangerous saying that they spread disease to wild salmon stocks messing with the ecosystems. They also violate traditions of coastal First Nations.

The movement against fish farms on the Pacific coast has proved a potent one. The British Columbian government has been paralysed on the issue. In 2008. it slapped a moratorium on granting any new licenses to fish farms on the north coast, despite record demand from Europe. Last year, Ms. Morton sued the province in court arguing that oceans were a federal matter, and the province had no right to even regulate aquaculture: the province lost.

"The issue is not the environment. I think the issue is competition. American wild fish interests are thwarting the [Canadian] farm-fish interests in the name of science, sustainability and conservation," says Vancouver seafood industry researcher Vivian Krause.

From 2000 to 2008, US foundations granted US$126-million to British Columbian groups opposed to fish farming, according to tax returns Ms. Krause has compiled; the Packard foundation alone has spent more than US$75-million, through 56 organisations to convince retailers and restaurants to avoid farmed British Columbian fish. Marketing efforts for so-called sustainable fish going by the name of "Seafood Choices" have moved Wal-Mart to favour "Marine Stewardship Council" certified seafood - of which Alaskan salmon comprises 95%.

The US-backed groups' "objective is not to find solutions to make this a more sustainable industry; their objective is to not have the industry," says Ruth Salmon, Executive Director of the Canadian Aquaculture Industry Alliance.

Fish farming in Canada goes back centuries, really, but when commercial aquaculture began to ramp up in recent decades, Alaska was hardest hit. Its waters are too cold for farming, so they rely on wild salmon. Prices for Alaskan wild-caught salmon collapsed in the 80s and 90s: the value of a harvest plunging from more than US$700 million a year to US$125 million in 2002. Fishing communities were devastated. In 2003, then Governor Frank Murkowski announced the solution lay in finding "a new way of marketing": branding Alaska's fish as superior to farmed products.